The amount of time estimated to repair a damaged vehicle part may vary substantially from estimate to estimate so that the estimated repair time from a repair service provider or appraiser is significantly different. The amount of time estimated to repair a damaged vehicle part may also vary substantially from the actual time it takes for a qualified technician to repair a damaged vehicle part. Moreover, the variation on estimated repair times may be much wider than the variation on actual repair times for a particular vehicle part. For example, the estimated repair times for a side door may range from 5 to 14 hours, whereas the actual repair times may only range from 0.5 to 3.5 hours for the side door. In this example, the spread of the estimated repair times is triple the spread for the actual repair times.
The difference in the amount of variation between the estimated and actual repair times highlights the challenges of manually estimating the amount of time it takes for repairing damaged vehicle parts. Such a wide variation creates an inefficient system where vehicle owners shop around at several vehicle repair facilities to find significantly lower estimates. Moreover, because insurance providers typically pay according to the estimate, the added variation may cause the insurance providers to overpay for vehicle repairs.